We were counting on luck way too much. It was time to start getting smart, or we were going to find ourselves locked up in those cells with our friends.
35
Zion stayed at the door for a long moment, listening intently, while the rest of us stood rooted to our spots, waiting for him to tell us whether it was safe or not.
Five seconds later, we heard a commotion some distance away—in what sounded like the atrium. A lot of shouting, then footsteps, and then… silence again.
“They’ve gone into one of the other hallways,” Zion breathed. “Maybe there aren’t cameras in this section, or maybe whoever is supposed to be manning those cameras got distracted. For whatever reason, it seems they didn’t catch us turning in here. Which means this is our chance.”
We burst out of the door with no idea of where we were going or whether we were being recorded, and I brought up the rear.
“Gabby, any tips on which of those doors might lead right into the prison block?” I whispered.
“The prison looks like it’s housed in the easternmost area of the compound,” she replied. “That’s really all I can tell you. Find the easternmost door and—”
“And hopefully that will lead us right to the prison cells,” I finished, yanking out my phone and bringing up the compass app.
I then glanced up at my friends hauling butt toward the opening back into the atrium, and realized that they were going to make a mistake.
Getting into the atrium before we knew exactly where we were going was exactly what we didn’t need to be doing. It was a wide-open space. Just a sunken circular courtyard, and nothing else. Absolutely no place to hide if those soldiers came back before we made a decision.
“Guys, hold up,” I hissed, skidding to a stop.
I held my phone up in front of me and stared at the compass app. According to my calculations, to reach the prison block…
“We need to go out of here and turn right,” I told them, my voice pitched low. “We need an east-facing door. Jace, you seem good with a compass. You can be in charge of guiding us. Everyone got it?”
Everyone looked at me, shocked, and I gulped, feeling almost as surprised. I’d just sounded as if I actually knew what I was talking about. And that was both exciting and scary at the same time.
“Go!” I hissed.
To my relief, everyone turned and ran, Jace in the lead with his compass out and held in front of him.
We raced through the doorway and into the brightly lit atrium, then made a sharp right, the rest of us following after Jace. We pounded along the walkway that ran above the sunken part of the courtyard, passing door after door, and then suddenly swerved into the fourth door down—and began running down another long, extremely dark and dingy hallway.
This hall had fewer doors, but many windows. Windows that looked into rooms that I didn’t want to see. I was too scared of what might be in there. There were lights embedded in the ceiling of this part of the compound, but the hallway was made of black cinderblock, and was distinctly sinister. The floor below us was also done in dark gray, and the whole effect was one of dank, dark despair.
“If this is the way to the prison cells, they couldn’t have been more obvious,” I said, breathing heavily.
How much farther ahead could the prison block possibly be? Yes, this was an enormous compound, but my senses told me that we had to have run through at least half of it by this time.
We burst out of the hallway that felt more like a tunnel thirty seconds later, and found ourselves in an enormous room without any dividing walls. It looked big enough to hold an entire football field. But instead, it was holding about fifty huge, clear plastic boxes.
And inside those boxes were people. Inside every box, I saw people.
“Holy God in Heaven,” I said, stumbling to a walk in shock. “What are they doing with so many prisoners in here?”
Alexy grabbed my arm and yanked me back into action.
“We don’t have time for questions like that, remember?” she said. “There are a lot of boxes in here, and we have to find which ones hold our friends.”
We raced down the first row we found, anxiously looking to the left and right. All of the prisoners looked as if they were in relatively good shape—clothed, rested, and fed, with no obvious marks of abuse—but I didn’t see any faces I recognized. Just box after box of complete strangers, housed in a mysterious detention center in the middle of Voceville by some sort of secret police agency that the government had never told anyone about.
I wondered suddenly who these people were, and what they’d done to wind up here. Were they all as innocent as our friends? Guilty of nothing more than speaking out against a government that had manipulated our society until we no longer knew what was ours and what wasn’t?
Then I saw a familiar face in front of me, and forgot about the other prisoners.
Suddenly, and without warning, Nelson had appeared up against the wall of the next box, her palms against the plastic wall, her green eyes staring right at me.
I very nearly broke down in tears of relief.
“Nelson,” I gasped.
And there, beyond her, I saw Abe’s long, sarcastic face, and Kory’s eternally cheerful one—though he looked like he’d lost at least some of his good humor during his stay.
And then, two other men that I… recognized.
“What are they doing here?” I whispered, drawing to a stop with Jace and scanning the box to see if anyone else was locked up with them. But it was only those five: Nelson, Abe, Kory… and the two guards we’d knocked out with our gas bombs in the basement of the warehouse we’d raided.
They shouldn’t have been here. They’d been in the warehouse, which had housed a site that belonged to the Ministry. I’d been positive that they were Ministry. So why were they locked up with our friends?
“Doesn’t matter,” Jace said, aiming his gun at the deadbolt on the door. He flashed a warning look at our friends within the box. “Stand back!”
They all shuffled backward quickly, as far as they could in the limited space, and then Jace fired, the gunshot reverberating uncomfortably loudly around the vast chamber.
It took five bullets, but finally the door gave way.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” he hissed, gesturing madly to the others.
Beyond us, I could see that Zion and Alexy were freeing another cell full of our people—and beyond them, Ant and Jackie were doing the same, the gunshots creating a cacophony of echoes.
I didn’t know why the Authority would have put all our friends together—it made things more convenient for us—but then I realized that they likely hadn’t thought we’d come in after them.
They’d likely thought we were actually going to turn ourselves in.
Which just meant that they had completely misjudged us. And, with luck, also underestimated us.
I scanned the growing crowd, seeing familiar face after familiar face, and jerked a bit at the thought that this was the first time I’d seen most of them in person and without their disguises on. Austin, Tilly, Winter, and then the techs I’d never even met, but had learned of and tried to save…
We were all here. Or rather, everyone who had been on the video was here. There were still people missing, but that was a problem for another day. For the moment, we had who we’d come for.
And we’d also found two anonymous men. Who I’d thought had been with the Ministry, but were somehow in an Authority prison. I watched them approach, then turned to glance at Jace, my eyebrows lifted in question.
“We might as well take them,” he said. “If they’re in an Authority prison it means they’re most likely Authority enemies, and they might come in handy. Even if they are Ministry—or Authority—we can use them for information or as hostages.”
I nodded quickly at his reasoning, and stood back to allow everyone out. Around us, the prisoners in the other boxes were screaming and jumping up and down, yelling at us to take them as well, not to leave
them here. It broke my heart, but we were already out of time. We had to get out of here.
“Let’s go,” Zion muttered, drawing up next to me.
None of us needed a second invitation.
We raced back the way we’d come, and I could see that Jace already had his compass out. That atrium had so many doors, one of them had to lead south—and through it, we might be able to find a way out of the building, to where Marco and Julia were hovering in the airship, waiting to rescue us.
We dashed down the aisle between two rows of boxes, Jace in the front and me bringing up the rear, with the rest of our team supporting our newly freed prisoners between us, and I could already see that our friends hadn’t been as well taken care of as we’d thought. Nelson was limping, and Abe was struggling as well, as if he didn’t have enough energy to keep up with us. The two anonymous men seemed to be even worse off—possibly because we’d gassed them just days earlier—and even Kory was lagging. The techs looked to be in slightly better shape, perhaps because they hadn’t actually been involved in a battle, but they’d also been in prison, and were starting to lose ground.
“Jace, you have to slow down, or you’re going to lose everyone,” I murmured through the comm, not wanting to yell. He immediately let up a bit, and I breathed a little easier. We’d already hit the hallway again, and I knew it would only take us moments to get through it—even moving as slowly as we were.
Then everything erupted into chaos on the comm.
The people who’d been running ahead of me started screaming frantic instructions and communications, and though I couldn’t make much of it out, I’d been on enough missions to know that screaming during a raid was not a good thing.
“What’s going on?” I yelled. “What’s happening? Gabby!”
There was no answer.
Then I was suddenly free of the hallway and back in the atrium, which was filled with Authority soldiers in blue armored suits and helmets.
36
I came skidding to a halt and started shouting as well.
“Gabby, we have to get the hell out of here!” I yelled. “Find me a way that doesn’t include this damn atrium! This place is crawling with soldiers!”
But it was no good, and I should have guessed that before I asked.
“I can’t give you anything, Robin,” she cried. “There’s no other way out of there that I can see!”
Jace, thinking more quickly than me, pulled out his compass, took a glance, and pointed toward one door in particular. “There!” he shouted.
We turned and ran without asking him where we were going. And we kept doing it, despite the bullets that were now flying toward us. At every turn, we followed his direction blindly, turning left, right, and then left again, and though I wondered where the hell he was taking us, I was far too busy trying to support Nelson while we ran to question him about it. She dropped behind the others almost immediately, and I had my shoulder shoved under her arm in an attempt to help her keep pace. I was out of breath and exhausted, but I was also riding high on adrenaline. I had to hope it wouldn’t let me down.
Behind us, I could hear the soldiers thundering after us. They were using their guns at every possible opportunity, and they were getting closer and closer to hitting us.
Nelson and I were still in the back, and I ducked as another bullet whizzed over our heads, embedding itself in the wall right next to us.
“We’re going to get shot,” she said desperately. “After all we’ve been through, we’re going to get shot trying to escape!”
And at that moment, a bullet hit me in the leg.
It felt as if my entire body exploded, or caught on fire. I stumbled and gasped, trying to force air back into my lungs after the shock, and then somehow managed to get my feet back under me and kept running, tears streaming down my face.
Nelson turned her face toward me, her mouth open to say something, but I beat her to it.
“Yes, they just got me,” I panted, trying to ignore the burning in my leg. “No, it’s not fatal, because I’m wearing a suit. But if they catch us, I have a feeling that will be. We gotta keep going.”
Thank God the suits were bullet resistant. Taking a bullet hurt like hell, but at least I was able to fight through it and keep stumbling forward.
But not everyone was wearing a suit. If a bullet hit one of the prisoners we’d just rescued, they’d be done for. And if anyone was shot from a closer range, there was no guarantee either…
“Jace,” I gasped through the comm. “Where are we going, and how long is it going to take to get there?”
I saw Jace take a glance at his compass ahead of me, and could imagine the intense focus of his face. Wherever he was leading us, he appeared to be doing it with purpose. I just wished he’d let us in on the secret.
I gasped as another bullet hissed past my right ear. The soldiers behind us were definitely gaining on us now, and it was only a matter of time before one of them hit someone else from our team with a bullet.
Where the hell were we going? We hadn’t headed south, I knew that much. In fact, I thought we’d headed in the exact opposite direction. North. Maybe Jace had decided that we just needed to get out of there however we could and had tried for the closest possible external wall. We hadn’t had blueprints of the place, but we had guessed that there were only a few exits. We’d been able to see that there was an exit on the south side, which was one of the reasons we’d stationed Julia and Marco there. And on the opposite side of the compound from them…
The yard. If we were going north, it meant we were heading directly for the yard that sat on that side of the building. In the wrong direction, if we meant to hook up with our airship.
“Julia, Marco, are you guys going to be able to get to us?” I huffed, steering Nelson around another corner and wondering whether I should tell Jace I needed help.
“No can do, Rob!” Marco barked into the comm. “We’ve got enough trouble up here ourselves.”
“What?” I shrieked. “What’s going on?”
“Authority airships,” Julia answered, her voice monotone and deadly serious. In the background, I suddenly realized that there were explosions and whistles behind her voice. They must have been going on for some time, but I’d been too wrapped up in my own escape to pick up on the ruckus. “They’re all over us up here. We’re using the guns Alexy showed us, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough. We’re going to have to run.”
I didn’t have an answer to that.
It was a big problem.
Ever since that guy had started yelling in the hallway, giving us away, we’d been forced to throw all plans and backup plans more or less out the window, and we’d been flying by the seat of our pants, just trying to survive. We probably shouldn’t have expected anything different, honestly, even with Zion and Alexy around to help us. We knew we were woefully outclassed and underprepared, coming in here—how could we possibly be prepared to run up against the government on their own turf?—and yet we’d tried anyway.
But if Marco and Julia abandoned us now, it meant we were truly screwed. It would mean we lost our only escape plan.
We had no other way to get out of the compound.
We hit a large storage room just then, and I nearly stopped in confusion. It was full of more massive boxes—some clear and some with opaque walls—and for a moment I thought we were in another prison block. But we were on the wrong side of the compound for that… unless there were two.
“What is this?” I shouted, horrified at how creepy it was.
“Doesn’t matter!” Zion shouted back. “Get through them and get out of the building!”
We started moving more slowly, dashing around and through the enormous free-standing rooms, ducking and weaving to keep things between us and the soldiers behind us—and to escape the bullets raining down on us. I could hear machine gun fire, and the bullets dinging off the boxes.
And then, quite suddenly, we hit an exit and were out into the yard.
The cold air hit me like a ton of bricks, and I gasped as it filled my lungs. We raced for the back of the yard, where we could see a small cluster of trees, and I started praying that we’d reach it before the soldiers spilled out of that warehouse.
Turning to my right, I saw Ant shoving his shoulder under Abe’s arm, and that Jackie had appeared on Nelson’s other side to help me with our injured comrade. Around us, other members of our group were helping those who were wounded—including newly freed prisoners, who were supporting their fellows.
We were all in this together, and the sense of shared purpose drove my spent and wounded legs forward toward those trees. Toward what I hoped would be some sort of cover.
When we made it to the tree line, we paused, then turned, and I guessed that we had all decided the same thing.
If our deaths were coming toward us, we wanted to see them before they arrived.
I, for one, didn’t want to be shot in the back.
The Authority soldiers came spilling out of the warehouse at that moment—more than I cared to count—and made right for us.
We started backing up, moving as quickly as we could, but within seconds we’d come right up against the wall that bordered the entire compound. The trees we’d hoped would offer cover were sparse, providing barely any shelter, and behind them the wall effectively ended any escape attempt.
We were well and truly trapped, with our only escape plan currently caught up in an air battle somewhere on the other side of the compound. If they were even still in the air.
“Oh God,” I breathed.
A second later, a large figure appeared next to me, and Jace was taking my hand.
“I’m not going to let them take us down without a fight,” he said clearly, and I wasn’t sure whether to burst out laughing or crying.
“Jace, I think they’re going to take us all, and I’m not sure we’re going to have much say in the issue,” I wheezed, wincing at the throbbing pain in my leg.
The Child Thief 2: Deep Shadows Page 33